Photoshop Smart Filters: Non-Destructive Blur Masking Techniques

Previously we saw that if we enable smart filters by converting a layer or multiple layers into a smart object, that smart object protects the original pixels so that when we apply the filter it applies it non-destructively. Now when we're doing a filter we might not want to apply that filter to the entire image. We might want to only have it apply to some of the image.

So that means we need to be able to mask that smart filter. So let's see how this works. Now just to review,  if we go in and we do a filter these are destructive by default unless you're applying them to a smart object.

So let me just show this if let's say I do a gaussian blur which is kind of a straight standard blur. It's a very smooth kind of blur. This will make everything blurry.

I don't want to blur the whole entire image though. I want to only blur some parts of the image but this blur is by default blurs everything unless you have a selection and I'm going to just hit okay and we see that it's blurred the image. I cannot just simply go back to that filter, choose it again,  see where I was, and then just go back to zero.

No, this is applying another additional blur. When you just do a regular filter they are destructive, they change the pixels. I can undo them as long as I have my history available but if I were to save and close this file when I open it back up it will be permanently blurred and there is no recovering that.

So I'm going to undo this and instead I want to apply a blur to the background. I want the foreground, the teepee here, to be the thing that I really focus on and when we think about the depth of field, so how deep is something compared to our location, the further away it goes the more blurry something should be. So things that are in the plane of existence with the teepee, so the ground here, this grass, the teepee itself, those things should be crisp and as it goes further back the blur should become more and more the farther back it goes.

So I want to apply a realistic blur because I think the background might be a little distracting and I want people to focus more on the foreground teepee, this product maybe that we're featuring or selling or that we want people to look at more. Because I'm not sure exactly how much blur I want to apply, I want to do this non-destructively. I might want to play with this,  change where the blur starts, where it ends, the amount of blur, all of those good things.

So I'm going to convert this into a smart object. I can either do that by right-clicking on the layer and saying to convert to smart object or if I'm going up to the filter menu thinking about I'm applying a filter, I can also say convert for smart filters which does exactly the same thing. Now I have a smart object, this is my photo and in it I have protected all of the original pixels as they exist right now.

To this smart object I can apply filters and they will apply non-destructively. So I'm going to go in, now I'm not going to do the standard kind of straight Gaussian blur, I'm going to do one of the blur galleries. The nice thing about the blur gallery is that these are more photorealistic blurs.

They try to create the out-of-focus appearance which we call bokeh. That is a photographic term for the unsharp or blurred areas. When we have that lens blur it's a bit more realistic instead of so kind of smooth and computer-like.

So there are different ways we can apply these. Any one of these that you choose will go into the blur gallery and then we can switch between them over here as necessary. But the one that I'm interested in here is the field blur.

Now I can adjust the amount here on this little circle and notice that there's some shapeliness to this. It's not quite as smooth as the Gaussian blur like here. There's some character to this, there's some kind of lines,  it's not a smooth computer kind of blur.

This is more realistic to an actual photography blur. Now you can change this amount over here on the right or you can change it in this little dial right here. But what's interesting about this is I can put one of these down here and then I can click to add another spot here and each of these can have a different amount of blur.

So I can take this dot right here if I click on that and I can remove all of the blur so that's in focus and then I can put this one up here and I can make that have a blur and then I can adjust. It will evenly kind of graduate here from this to this. It gradually changes between those two values.

So I could put it over here and it creates a diagonal blur but I'd want something to be maybe somewhere about like so and something kind of like this. Now I've not masked out that tp so if I just go ahead and hit okay that will just apply it and notice there is no mask so it is applying everywhere to the image. I really only want that to be in the tp.

So before I make that I could select the area that I want before I do that. So I just kind of wanted to show you what that does by default. I could make the mask right now.

I could certainly do that but I'm going to just drag that to the trash just to get rid of it just so you can see also that it is non-destructive. But generally speaking what you do is you select an area and then you go apply a filter or something to it. So you select the thing you want to change and then you go about changing it and it will create that mask for you.

So I want to select the tp and well actually I want the background technically speaking. I want to blur everything but to the tp but I actually think it's going to be easier to select the tp and then inverse the selection. So you always have to think about what is easier to select.

Is it easier to select the thing that I want or the thing that I don't want and then I can always just inverse my selection to get the opposite of that. I think in this case it's easier to select the tp and then say I want to blur everything else. So I'll inverse.

Now this is an object and I think the object selection tool would be good. When I choose this object selection tool here it sometimes will take a moment to detect objects and then as I hover over those objects whether it's the background or the people here. See now the background does not include the entire background.

It's not the people you know it's the vegetation there. Now I can go over the tp and it does select the tp pretty well although I don't think it's going to be perfect here. You can also if this doesn't highlight every single object that you want.

So let's say for example you want this little character right here. You can also just drag over an area and it will look in that area and select what you drag over. If drag over this area for example it will select part of his head.

If I drag over this area it will select the window in the tp. So you can click on objects to select them or you can drag over areas and it will select what it thinks is the object that you want to select. Now it is guessing it does not always guess properly but it is actually quite amazing and pretty good at doing this.

So I'm going to click on the tp just to get my selection started and it's probably not going to be perfect. So I want to go in and refine this selection using select and mask. Now as far as previewing this selection there are different ways to preview this.

Right now it's not on any other different layers so maybe that's not a great selection to have. They're a great preview I should say. I can preview it as black and white but then I can't really see what I'm working with here.

I could preview it on black but then I can't see the parts that are or aren't selected. I think the overlay would be a good way to preview this because as I refine this I can see the foreground and the background and see the parts that I want to or don't want to include. Just make sure that you are aware of what this color indicates.

This color right here which the color is customizable because what if this was a primarily red image? Red would not be a good color for that. In this case there is not a lot of red in this image so I think that's good. You always want to choose a color that is very vibrant that really stands out from a background.

For example green would not be a great example although if you had a really red image then green would stand out a lot. So just choose some color that is very vibrant, very saturated, very much stands out from the background that's easy to see. And then what does that color indicate? Masked areas.

If you about masking tape you mask off the parts you don't want to work with. So I've selected the tp so it's like I've masked off the other areas that I don't want to work with. The selected areas which I think is actually more intuitive because normally on computers we're used to highlighting something and the thing that has the color is selected.

So I like color to indicate selected areas. Now that's purely a personal preference you can work the way you want to that's just how I like to work. And then you can adjust the level of opacity.

You do not want this to be all the way up because you need to see what you're working with. You also don't want it to be too low where you can't see your color. Somewhere in between somewhere around 50% often works pretty good for most situations.

And then we can zoom in closer on this and see how good of a job or bad of a job did this do. And it did a pretty good job although there are some parts that are missing here. So for example up here there's a little part that's missing and I can use my brush tool over here set to add or subtract.

In this case I want to add so I'm going to paint that in. Now if you paint too far, oops, then you can go back and you can subtract. Let's say like that.

There might be parts that it added that you don't want so you could subtract those. And one thing that I think we'll notice here is that these are straight lines that it didn't really do a great job of selecting as straight lines. So let me show you a cool way to make really straight lines because trying to paint with your mouse or a trackpad or something to draw straight lines is very difficult.

So I'm just going to temporarily hit okay here. We'll come back to that mode and keep working on it. And I'm just going to create a new file to demonstrate this concept here.

And the idea is to paint straight lines. So how do we paint straight lines? Well not from dragging. Dragging no matter how far no matter how kind of hard you try it's going to be very difficult.

So what you can do here's the here's the cool trick. Normally when you click and you click and you click you just make dots. However if you click and then you hold shift and click you make a straight line between those two dots.

So instead of just click you do click and then you shift click. So you're holding shift and clicking and it will connect wherever you're clicking to the previous place you clicked. So that can make really nice straight lines over and over and over again repeatedly.

So that is going to be very useful when painting in this mode. Now I can go back into my selected mask. And when I'm painting here let's say it put too much here and I need to remove some.

I can go in with my minus tool and if I click on the one end hold shift and click on the other it will make a straight line. And then here I think I need to add some. So I'm going to go to the plus and I'm going to click on the one end hold shift click on the other end and then it fills in a nice straight line.

Let's see that here. Click hold shift click makes a really nice straight line. So click hold shift click makes a really nice straight line.

So I find that very very useful. Now when you zoom in I don't really like this pixel grid where the pixels are outlined in white. Luckily that's a view setting you can turn off under view show and you can turn off that pixel grid.

That is just something that is a distraction for me. I like to turn that off. Maybe if you're doing pixel icon design you might want to have that on.

But I find in photo retouching I find it a distraction rather than a help. Here's a straight line. I'm going to click on one end hold shift click on another line on the other end of the line and just makes a straight line there for me.

Beautiful. Now here especially if I switch back and forth see how there is some green there. That green is from the background and I want to remove that.

So I'm going to go to the minus go to a slightly smaller brush here. I'm going to click hold shift click again. Some of these areas I can simply paint away.

Here I can click hold shift click to draw a straight line. I need to get a little closer to that and I can get rid of this stuff that is not the part of the teepee that I want. So I would proceed to go and improve all of those little areas adding or subtracting from my selection to perfect all of this area.

I don't need to worry about the bottom part because I'm not going to be blurring the bottom part. So I really only need to worry about the upper part from like let's say around here up to make sure that that is good. And then once I am done with this selection which if I need to do any global refinements by the way if I need to smooth things or soften with a feather I can do that but I don't think I need to do that in this particular selection.

Now I could either hit okay and then I could invert or I can hit invert right now. If I click invert that gives me the background which is actually what I want. So I could either do that now or I can do that later either way is fine.

In this case I want it to simply output to a selection. I don't want a layer mask because a layer mask is different from a filter mask. A layer mask would only show me the tp it would hide the background.

I still want to see the background so I simply want a selection so that I can move forward by blurring what I have selected. So I will choose selection and now I've got the background selected. If I had forgotten to invert in that dialog I could simply go up here and select inverse either place it does the same thing.

So basically now I have the selection of the thing that I want to change. I've got my smart object so that my filter will be applied non-destructively as a smart filter and now I can go and do my blur gallery of my field blur and I know that the preview here does show you blurring everything. It doesn't show you the mask that it's going to create but it will be fine.

Just trust me once we click okay everything will be fine. Just pay attention to the blur that you're doing here. I am adding a blur of zero down here so I have no blur down at the bottom and it will not blur the tp once we hit okay and so I'm just really seeing kind of what kind of blurriness I want.

How much do I want to blur that background? I think something like this looks good. Now if you want it to be better quality but take a little longer to render you could check on high quality which I would advise. It just takes a little bit longer for you to wait for that blur to render and then we hit okay and now we can see it did not blur the tp because it created a mask.